Photography by Alana Paterson

Photography hasn’t featured here on the site in a long time, generally I don’t come across many portfolios that entice me (I’m quite picky!). Either that or they’ve been shown here on the blog before. I guess that becomes a problem in itself, I’m regularly checking back with individuals that I already know but aren’t discovering many others. So I was glad to kick this trend and bump in to the works of Alana Paterson, someone who I have seen in the past, but I can’t recall such a wide variety of photographs with beautiful graining and colour. There’s some real consistency across all the series on her website.

I mean this in a good way as well, they’re not lacking in substance at all, there’s some really experimental stuff going on. One of my favourite photographs has to be the one seen below, which is of her friend reeling in a scarf or some sort of material, it almost looks like she’s pulling in the trees from a distance. This is the magic of film in a lot of ways, often you get little gems like this where ghostly silhouettes or interesting effects that weren’t intentional appear out of nowhere. You should definitely try and get your hands on a film camera if you don’t already own one, it’s a totally different experience having to wait until they’re processed and being very selective with your shots, sometimes giving you time to contemplate, but at others having to be very fast and react to any situation in front of you.

The photographs that resonate with me the most are the simplistic ones, like above, which are perfectly composed and have an eye catching appeal. This composition could be my design brain telling me about grids and things of that nature, even if it i, they still draw my eye to the shot. In some ways Alana is a photography rebel, having quite a varied lifestyle her works often capture youthful tendencies that happen erratically in daily life. As you can imagine her photography hasn’t just been noticed by me, she has also worked for various publications across the world and you will see her work featured quite a bit on the web. I’m sure she’ll grow in popularity as her work progresses and matures.

As I mentioned above you will find a little gems in her portfolio that you have to search for, so I’d recommend heading to he website to have a look and see if you can spot any that take your fancy. I found quite a few that were obscure and unique. Overall a fantastic selection of works that anyone can appreciate. Enjoy!

alanapaterson.com

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